


Wishing

by sheafrotherdon



Series: Nantucket AU [13]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-22
Updated: 2007-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:02:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney wishes he knew how to tell John how he feels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wishing

There are days when Rodney wishes he were a different person, someone for whom careful words come as easily as vitriol does. He has ideas – vague, shape-shifting bursts of color and remembered bursts of music (Beethoven, Journey, the Eurythmics, Gershwin) – all of which, he's sure, add up to something he wants to say to John. But he can't close his fingers around it – the words keep slipping away, and he's not that man anyway, given to penning verse or writing letters; he has equations to reflect the ways the universe works.

Still, he wishes – wishes he were a different man, with a talent for pairing adjectives and nouns; a man who could turn his thoughts from Nantucket fog into clean, crisp beach-sweeps of well-expressed reason. If he could – if he could . . .

He'd say – I like that your socks fall down. (Perhaps the water's too hot when you wash them; perhaps you're destroying the elastic; perhaps – ) You tilt your head when you're sad and I've noticed. One morning I woke up before you and you were elegant, careless, sprawled out across the sheets with such abandon I thought I was dying, honestly dying, losing the last of my breath, seeing my end, and I begged (in my head) to be able to touch you and I closed my hand around your wrist and you woke up. You woke up and kissed me and I didn't die, and that's the sort of miracle religious people never see.

You should eat more kinds of cheese.

I don't understand the way you smile, except in the spaces between my wristbones and I know you hid the remote that afternoon. Some days the distance between my house and yours is twice as far as usual and I think I can't close the gap, but then you show up, breathless from running, and I realize I'm fond of the way you _sweat_. If I could argue with only one person for the rest of my life I'd choose you.

Please stop trying to make me like peas.

I haven't read _Catcher in the Rye_. New York doesn't interest me. I hated the smell of salt-water when I was eight, because I thought there were sea-monsters and they'd find me (in Toronto – I know, I know, but there's only so much order an eight-year old brain can take, and in the spaces math and physics couldn't claim I ran scared and small to the ocean).

Your blue shirt is my favorite.

Please don't die or drive an SUV or turn vegan or tell me the Yankees aren't so bad. I couldn't stand it. One afternoon you laughed so long and hard I thought you'd be sick and you nearly were and that was – terrifying. I've never been funny.

I'm short and you're taller than me and my shoulders are broader – I'm petty, but I've been keeping a list of the ways my body isn't like yours and I cling to the couple of things my bones do better. My thumbs bend differently to the way yours do, and I can't stop watching your hands.

I know all the words to Abba songs.

If it's all right with you I'd like to never lose sight of your couch and to always fear your coffeepot will kill me with that noise it makes before it decides to brew. Because you stretch in your sleep and read the newspaper out of order and once you told me that I smelled good.

You're messy in every best sense of that stupid word and I never saw this, not when I thought of my future, and I know how time works and what makes your planes fly but I'm not very good at knowing when to touch. But if you reach for me first I'll always reach back.

– he'd say: John, warm, _need_ , please, and he's saying it now in the best way he can, lips pressed together, crooked and uncertain, staring at John as he comes downstairs. And John rubs his eyes and blinks when he sees him clutching the coffeepot, and when he smiles Rodney can breathe again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Hoping](https://archiveofourown.org/works/118127) by [sheafrotherdon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon)




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